Apart from a few Beach Boys and Kosmische things I picked up in America in the early ‘90s, I’ve never been much of a bootleg collector; never had the time, I guess, with so much legitimately released music to get hooked on. As a consequence, my knowledge of Neil Young’s “Chrome Dreams” was limited to hazy memories from rush-reading Jimmy McDonough’s “Shakey” until news of “Chrome Dreams II” broke a few weeks ago. I’ve heard “Chrome Dreams II” now, and I’m broadly struggling to see its connection to the first mythical set. In some ways, it’s a kind of reverse: if “Chrome Dreams” was a collection of great Neil songs that were subsequently dispersed across various disparate albums, “Chrome Dreams II” in part seems to be a collection of disparate, mainly great Neil songs that have been gathered together, somewhat belatedly. We know – thanks to the unflinchingly accurate internet, at least – that the first three songs on this new album were all written and abandoned by Young at some point in the ‘80s. “Beautiful Bluebird”, a rheumy-eyed country amble, would have featured on the original, rejected version of “Old Ways”. “Boxcar”, a twanging and discreetly propulsive train song, was part of the shelved “Times Square” set that just predated “Freedom”. There is no palpable reason why he’s sat on these two tunes for so long, but the mystery becomes more pronounced when track three arrives, and seems determined to never leave. This is “Ordinary People”, a heroically trudging narrative that lasts over 18 minutes and originates from the Bluenotes sessions circa “This Note’s For You” (if you look on Youtube, there’s some footage of Young playing the song live in 1988). My favourite Neil music has always been electric and long, with a sort of relentless, dogged purpose to it. You could probably measure the pace of “Ordinary People” in swings of a wrecking ball, but there’s a difference between this and obvious comparison tracks like “Cortez The Killer” and “Like A Hurricane”. As each verse ends and Young steps up to solo, he’s joined by a blaring horn section, who occasionally duck out for solos themselves. When the sax player moves into the spotlight, and a piano line rolls through the mix, there’s an odd echo of ‘70s E-Street Band. It’s preposterous, and fantastic. After this, the rest of the album is purportedly new music. Unlike “Living With War”, “Prairie Wind” et al, Young doesn’t stick to one style. Instead, he promiscuously wanders through a pretty wide range; it’s notable that his band here features one Crazy Horse (Ralph Molina), one Stray Gator (Ben Keith) and one Bluenote (Rick Rosas). Not all of these diversions are entirely welcome: “Shining Light” and “The Believer” have a limpid soul lilt that reminds me a little of my least favourite Neil album, “Are You Passionate?”; and the closing “The Way” nails the recurring theme of finding a path back to contentment, home, spiritual fulfilment and such, but does so with the aid of an inevitably mawkish children’s choir. “Spirit Road” tackles the same issues much better, with a rattly belligerence and massed vocals that recalls “Living With War” and the best parts of “Greendale”. There are a couple more great rock songs on “Chrome Dreams II”, too: “Dirty Old Man” is a crude-as-hell garage gruntalong that reminds me variously of “Re-Ac-Tor”, some of “Ragged Glory” and “Piece Of Crap” from “Sleeps With Angels”. Even better, “No Hidden Path” is another epic workout (a measly 11 and a half minutes, if you’re counting), that very nearly matches “Ordinary People” for gravity, sustained intensity, and the sense that Young is still uncommonly close to the top of his game. The whole thing adds up to an uncharacteristically satisfying hotch-potch. It’s a fool’s game to try and understand Neil Young’s infallibly contrary thought processes, but it sounds as if the preparation of Archives has inspired him to look at his career as a whole, to make more explicit the way it all fits together. After the righteous indignation of “Living With War”, the prevailing mood of “Chrome Dreams II” is of finding contentment. But what makes it so gripping is the number of contrasting ways that Young finds to make his point.

It occurred to me last night, a minute or so into “Dance Dance Dance”, that I might have been a little blasé about this latest visitation from Brian Wilson and his band. As Alexis Petridis noted in his excellent review of the first night of Wilson’s latest Festival Hall residency, there’s a vague feeling of “nostalgia fatigue” surrounding these dates. I’ve seen him do “Pet Sounds”, “Smile”, and great further swathes of his gilded back catalogue, and I haven’t seen many better gigs in the past decade. But did I really need to see him do it again? It seems so. There’s a lot of care gone into these shows, clearly, to try and refresh the formula; most notably, of course, a new song cycle called “That Lucky Old Sun” which makes up the second half of the show. There’s also an awkwardly swinging cover of “She’s Leaving Home”, which seems to be a blatant – and thus far unsuccessful – lure to pull off a headline-grabbing duet with Paul McCartney. For the first half, Wilson and his band have cannily chosen plenty of songs that haven’t figured in previous setlists. Inevitably, this means a deeper than ever immersion in the corners of the back catalogue familiar only to hardcore Beach Boys spods like myself. Goodness, they’re playing “I’d Love Just Once To See You” and “Salt Lake City”. Here comes great swathes of the “Today!” album, an underappreciated trial run for “Pet Sounds”. Much here is mind-blowingly lovely: those exquisitely detailed eight-part harmonies; Jeffrey Foskett’s unwavering falsetto lead on “She Knows Me Too Well”; the dork baroque of “Do You Wanna Dance?”; that meticulously timed false ending in “When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)”, and the heartbreaking “Won’t last forever/ It’s kinda sad” coda which follows it. I’m sat closer to the stage than previous Wilson shows, and so I can see him better than before: he doesn’t seem to look tortured or miserable like some suggest, and the stiff handjives he uses to articulate emotions seem more like evidence of his quirkily deadpan sense of humour than any cruel regime. His voice gets stronger with every visit, too – especially emphatic on a great “Sail On Sailor” – though, as “Heroes And Villains” proves, the more impassioned he becomes, the more off key he wanders. Never mind: this is still one of the great spectacles of the rock heritage circuit. In the company of these songs, “That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative)” is immediately at a disadvantage. It seems that a bunch of new songs co-written by Wilson and a previously insignificant member of his band, Scott Bennett, have been bolted together into some conceptual stew. A rich old spiritual, “That Lucky Old Sun” provides melodic glue (think of “You Are My Sunshine” in “Smile”). Van Dyke Parks supplies vague narrative links between the songs, a romantic rendering of LA history that pales rather next to his and Wilson’s neglected “Orange Crate Art”. The ambition is clearly to create another “Smile”, of sorts. Perhaps inevitably, it doesn’t quite work. There are some lovely tunes scattered here and there throughout the piece, but they often seem fragmented. As the band diligently flit from theme to theme, there’s a stridency which feels a bit too forced and self-conscious, and a sense that while the arrangements are meticulous, the songs sometimes don’t feel quite finished. The knowing echoes of old Beach Boys songs provide a field day for the fans, but are also desperately strained at times, especially a Frankensteinian hybrid called “Forever You’ll Be My Surfer Girl”. “Mexican Girl”, meanwhile, is a frantic collection of sonic clichés in search of cohesion, and while lyrical inanity has been a key point of the Beach Boys’ appeal at times, Bennett or Parks probably went too far with the likes of “I’ve got a notion/ We all come from the ocean.” But enough griping. It seems churlish to criticise the ambition of all this too much, however forced it may be. And there are enough pretty moments to suggest that a finessed studio version of the suite might be quite rewarding. “Midnight’s Another Day” has rightly been getting the plaudits, one of those plangent, poignant ballads in the vein of “Still I Dream Of It”. That said, it’s not materially any better than “Gettin’ In Over My Head”, from Wilson’s last decent, if generally mauled, solo album. I guess the conclusion to all this seems to be a fairly depressing one: that we want our old heroes to remain creatively potent, but we’d rather they played some weird and obscure old songs instead of the new stuff. Or maybe it’s just me – the rapturous response afforded “That Lucky Old Sun” suggests the fans are impressed with it, and I can imagine the Brian Wilson messageboards are vibrating with love. I don’t want to sound prematurely smug, but let’s just see how many of these new songs he plays on his next visit. . .